President Donald Trump and his associates have been going on and on about supposed corruption on the part of former Vice President and leading Democratic presidential primary candidate Joe Biden, but this week, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko directly refuted these claims of corruption from Trump. Trump has insinuated over and over again that when pressuring Ukrainian authorities while in office as vice president to fire a top prosecutor, Joe was benefiting his son Hunter, who sat on the board of an energy company that was supposedly under investigation.
The reality, Poroshenko shared, is that he knows of no evidence of the former vice president ever taking any step to get any particular case closed, about his son or otherwise.
He explained:
‘The former vice president, at least in personal conversations, didn’t raise any requests to open or close any concrete cases.’
As he also noted, the prosecutor in question that was eventually fired was not just the former vice president’s personal target. Rather, even a full two-thirds majority of the Ukrainian Parliament at the time voted to oust the official, and many outside of government had been pushing for his removal too. The story at the time was that the prosecutor wasn’t strenuous enough in going after corruption — not that there was any kind of secret campaign from Biden to get the prosecutor dismissed to protect his son and family financial interests. There’s just no evidence for that.
That’s not to say the president and his cronies are going to dump these claims any time soon. Perhaps next they’ll suggest that the former vice president secretly got a majority of a foreign parliament on his side too. Oh and maybe — just maybe! — Biden invented a time machine and traveled backwards to be the one really behind Watergate! The point is that there’s little to no apparent limit to the completely baseless stories that Trump and his team are willing to throw around.
Besides Poroshenko, another key former Ukrainian official has spoken out against the president’s fairy tale as well. The country’s former top prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko said just recently that his office abandoned a case on Hunter Biden after they found simply no evidence of wrongdoing.
Lutsenko shared:
‘From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything.’
That’s not exactly ambiguous. These people are directly and explicitly saying that the Bidens never did that which they’re accused of, full stop. Yet, even still Trump is desperately pointing off into the distance, hoping to find something, anything to prove his case.
This Thursday at the White House before departing for Florida, where he was set to deliver remarks about Medicare in a retirement community, Trump told reporters that he thinks Ukraine and China should investigate the Bidens.
This is the mess that’s sparked an impeachment inquiry, but the president doesn’t seem to care, perpetually unwilling to look beyond his own ego, it seems.
Featured Image via screenshot
